BANNOCKBURN, IL – The industry standard for compliance documentation involving environmental regulations has been updated to include the REACH and China RoHS requirements.

IPC-1752A, Materials Declaration Management, is said to provide an expanded industry-wide reporting format for material declaration data exchange between companies in the electronic interconnect supply chain.

The revised spec has a broader scope to address compliance with additional substance restrictions, including REACH and China RoHS. The new standard is also set up to more efficiently incorporate additional substance restrictions, promulgated through either existing or new regulations.

One shift in the standard is the focus on the definition of the data fields and structure through the XML schema. To improve capabilities with version 2.0, the subcommittee chose to focus efforts on the schema changes and open up any software development to third-party software providers.

The committee has been working with third-party software developers to ensure the development of implementation tools supporting the 1752A materials data exchange. A basic and free open source product developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, called Scriba, is a Java-based tool that supports all the major features of IPC-1752A.

While Scriba doesn’t handle database storage, users who need that function can buy commercial software or create their own database management system using XML schema. A handful of software companies have or will soon have programs ready.

IPC-1752A is modular, to facilitate user navigation.